What changes will the DWARF FORTRES STEAM version receive? Interview Translation with the Developer

Dwarf Fortress, according to the creator of this game, is a simulator of fantasy-worlds, each of which is generated with a unique map, stories and characters. The player can take on the role of the manager of the small detachment of the dwarves (do not be confused with the gnomes!), land anywhere in the created world and build a colony for life. You can also play as in the classic Roguelike, choose the creature of one of the 4 main races: dwarves, people, elves and goblins, or from many semi-fat races (people and two-legged alligators are okay, but starting like a man-comar or a man-lover?), and go on a trip.

Brothers Tarn and Zach Adams are developing the game, the publisher in Steam and possible help in development will be the Kitfox Games studio will perform.

I wanted to translate these interviews, as well as answer the question: what will change in the game with her arrival in Steam?

Brief squeeze of changes and plans:

Steam version will receive graphics, sound accompaniment, a processed interface, support control;

If the authors can achieve complete control of the game using the mouse, it will be possible to port on mobile devices;

Before arriving at Steam, the authors will finish the “villains” update, which will greatly expand the system of interactions between the characters: they will be able to make plans, bribe, false evidence, create entire corruption networks for their goals and look for traitors;

In the adventurer mode, it will be possible to control more than one character, but by a whole detachment, as if in party RPG (Baldur’s Gate, Dragon Age, Divinity, and T.p.)

Adams brothers simply want the necessary for survival, and getting millions is a concept that they cannot realize.

“We allowed the risks [related to the development of Dwarf Fortress] since I left the work of mathematics [. 1sh. Let go and forget. Just go along the road and do not worry about the consequences, ”says Tarn Adams. We communicate on the GDC (Game Conference of Developers) in San Francisco, a week passed after the announcement of Dwarf Fortress release on Steam. For decades, Adams Simulator developed in the ASCII-style will come along with new graphics, sound accompaniment and polished user interface. This is magnificent news, but their reason is gloomy: Adams worry about health and understand that after many years of life due to folk funding, meeting with cancer or other serious illness can become a ruin.

“You are faced with such things,“ he says. “This can become one big catastrophe that it will destroy everything. And [remain] only this oppressive duty. Debt prisons [approx. 2] and all related to this. Not a particularly attractive way to leave.”

The incentive for sales Dwarf Fortress and the promise given to the fans that Tarn will save part of the money to take care. He and his brother grew up in the solar desert of California: “Skin cancer has always been a significant part of my life”. Except how to support life and not sit in a debt prison, Adams has no other ideas what to spend money if Dwarf Fortress will take off on Steam.

I am interested in his opinion about the possible outcome of events: Dwarf Fortress will be sold a million copies of $ 20 each. What will his life become?

“There are no particular reasons to get to a million copies, but if this happens, I will have about $ 5 million and I will have it and I don’t know what it will mean,” he answers. “It somehow distorts my morality and turns me into a strange personality? Because this can happen. That’s why I think to deal with them as soon as possible. People expect me to take care of myself, this is included in my plans: to make sure that everything will be all right with my health, that everything will be in order with the game. And the remaining? You know, full of people and animals, and different things that have problems. Children without school supplies. This kind of situation. Something like in the film “Millions of Bryster”. You just need to get rid of them, something like that I feel it.”

The graphics of the Steam version of Dwarf Fortress are much easier to perceive compared to the original ASCII style.

I have not met so many people whose words: “We do not know at all what to spend money on,” ”could be believed, but Adams is one of these. I can come up with a bunch of things that I would spend money. Our brains work in a completely different way. It works towards the development of Dwarf Fortress, and even more than ten years later it brings him a sense of satisfaction.

“Even when we were young children, we constantly thought about this, we wanted to do magic things. We wanted to create the basis with our laws and properties. Ships, for example, we talked about ships? [approx. 3] I want ships! This will not change. Although I am sitting on a bunch of money, even on a coin of 25 cents, until I die, we will continue to create.”

He understands that money will change many things. You can hire someone to help with graphic programming so that Tarn himself focuses on the development of innovations, for example, a long-developed system of magic. He wants the creators to continue his business and after the release in Steam. And if there is enough money for the whole future life, why not upload the source code?

Tarn can be such a person who does not even think about luxury in life, but at the same time he realizes how it sounds.

“Now it’s easy to say,” he adds to his position “Get rid of this”. “I don’t know the psychology of such things. Too difficult, especially when you watch the prices for treatment. What should I do? When the feeling comes that I had already spent enough? I don’t know. This is a moral test that I need to go through.”

And if he appears on the next GDC by a rich man hung with diamonds?

“You can easily take a picture of me and neighing over my back, such as:‘ Five years of Tarn Adams on GDC, and now he is a fucking shmuck.’[Approx. 4sh. It’s great, I like it, “he says with a laugh.

Tarn received a doctoral degree www.jettbet-casino.uk/ in mathematics at the University of Washington and worked for a year in the doctorship of the University of Texas A&M;

Tarn Adams about why the time has come to support the mouse and his ideas about teaching mechanics of the game through Steam achievements.

For more than ten years, the interface in Dwarf Fortress has not been completed. A bulky list of teams asks to press some random keys to open an additional menu. This is the largest barrier for players in Dwarf Fortress, and its developers – Tarnu and Zak Adams – this problem is known from the very beginning. This is one of those problems that they did not even try to work on the correction, since there are always other things that you can do, and the game constantly remains incomplete. Why work on the convenience of all these menus, if everything changes in the future in the future?

Since Dwarf Fortress goes to Steam, Tarn Adams says the time has come to focus on such things. The most obvious option for the Steam version of DF is the arrival of graphics, but after a conversation with Tarny, I realized that its ideas for remaking the interface are associated with the implementation of Steam-leading and adding training, so that new players are easier to get comfortable.

Here’s what he said.

PC Gamer: Steam version will not appear soon, but in my opinion, the user interface has a huge potential besides graphics. I think you yourself will say that the teams from the keyboard were not very thought out. There is something that they would like to change yourself, or give for processing kitfox? Already planned?

Tarn Adams: I am sure that there will be more proposals, but over 10 years we have already received many ideas from the community, they all recorded them, just have not yet begun to work on their embodiment. [Laughs] My brother works with this better while I finish [the villainous update that is coming soon]. Now he is engaged in a more serious project: he collects and compares various user interface options.

Do we have to make advice and training? The answer seems obvious. It’s hard to do Good training, but at least just training for DWARF FORTRES: to throw different jumping up tips, the implementation of some simple instructions, such things can be quickly applied to, for example, mining, without spending months.

At the same time, it is worth taking into account many things that can go wrong during training: it is one thing to just take a mining, but go through it in an already living fortress … You have a yard, and you want to give him a kirk and start digging. Maybe he will do so, but how many reasons why the Dvorf will lose Kirk? If both of his hands are broken after an accident, for example, a tree fell on him, because you ordered a carpenter to go outside and cut down a tree, and training at this time: “Hey, why are you not digging?”

We need to determine what is happening, but there are many events because of which training will go wrong. I think we are a little more complicated in the situation than the average game, even if we talk about the basic work of training. But this is also a small fun test, make such a small “normal mining detector”. And then you begin to think that such things should be in the game itself, briefly,: “Why this work was not completed?”Now we add such a system that it solves part of the problems with learning.

In addition, the solution may be the code: “You know, we will give you a one-time repair of the limbs, your yard may not have hands for some reason, we will not blame you for this, hold your hands back, let’s complete your training together.”

Teach should be taught so that the player will figure it out once and used in the future, we must achieve an understanding of the main game mechanic. Beekeeping Guide is a little out of this framework. But here the achievements of Steam go on stage.

In general, the idea is this: there is an achievement, for example, to divide one colony of bees and get two colonies, we will give him a funny name, this will make it clear to people that beekeeping is what you can do in the game. People who want to get 100% of the game, or just look at the list of achievements, unexpectedly understand that in the game you can do soapworking, beekeeping, pottery, glass production, livestock farming. We will let people know that in the game it is.

I will turn to indie developers: this is one of the philosophy of achievements. What will you do with them? Should they be in the game, this is first. If they have, what we ourselves are inclined, we need to determine why they are needed. It is quite pointless to have the achievements of “kill 100 of that”, “kill 200 this”. This disappoints, dull achievements.

PC Gamer: You announced the support of the mouse in the game. Now, in fact, there is no support, so?

Tarn Adams: It’s as strange as everything else. You can denote places for digging a mouse, but the game will not tell you this, you just need to try. “Here the mouse generally works?“You can manage the mouse somewhere by 20% of all the menu, the buttons are all clickable-it seems in the troops menu you can click on anything.

So support for the mouse, the very opportunity to do something in the game, is already there, the position of the cursor is monitored. This is just one of those things that are difficult to allocate time to say to myself: “I’m going to spend 3 weeks to do better.”Plus I was like” Yes, all these menu will still change a bunch of times “. There was no time to do.

If we say: “In the next two or three months, we work only on convenience, while everyone else is engaged in graphics”, the whole team is in work, such
I had an impression after the announcement, and this is a great feeling.

Maybe problems will be with the learning curve (with me), but I can give myself to this. I don’t lazy, I can learn something quickly. I hope to finish work perfectly. This is a giant game, and many things can go wrong in it, but I give a 100% guarantee that it will be better than now. You do not have to move on the UJK keys on two small rectangles on the landing screen. It can just be taken to take a mouse and “owl-uguh. Everything, landed.”

PC Gamer: It’s rather mad to think about Dwarf Fortress, which you play as a real -time strategy.

Tarn Adams: I really like falling out lists for PKM. I don’t know if I will make a radial menu. You can throw radial menu everywhere if you want it. And for simple things, for example, you want to put the bed: I pressed the carpenter with the right button, I chose the bed, here you have a bed. Instead of pressing “Q”, moving the selection cursor to Plotnitskaya, press “b”, twice “+”, “Enter”. 27 clicks on the keys and maybe you will have a bed.

The outgoing update of “villains” with the insidious plans of bad guys and deep RPG mechanics.

Before the creators of Dwarf Fortress begin to work on the release of the game in Steam with a beautiful new graphics and an improved interface, they are going to release a large update. After the release, Steam will come for a magic system, the introduction of which may take a couple of years. Fortunately, the new system of villains, over which, as Tarn Adams told me, he has been working for more than nine months, will bring a lot to the game. Part of the new release is devoted to the adventurer regime, which will receive its largest update over the years, allowing you to control not just one yard, but a whole detachment as in party RPG.

The majority of what you read about Dwarf Fortress is most likely related to the strength of the fortress, where you need to build a fortress and direct your yard. While they are building civilization. But you can also play in the adventurer mode and
try a more “mundane” journey around the world that you generated before. It is played approximately as in classic pungent, with the exception of a massive world with all these systems of procedural generation.

Before the release of this update, you could manage only one character, but it will change and become much more developed. So Tarn Adams describes how the updated system will work:

“In the adventurer mode, the creation of the character was very simple. You could not take objects, just chose skills from the list and where you start. Now we have converted so that you start with a certain number of glasses, you buy features of the character, different objects on them. We always wanted to recreate the experience of Ultima or Jrpg, where you wander with more than one character. And it is quite easy to integrate, since the partners have already been implemented.”

“This is one of those things that are difficult to do in sredes – the opportunity to have friends and satellites, since this requires separate artificial intelligence. But we have already done it. So it’s not very difficult to say: “Okay, we can let you start with other people who have joined you.”So you can create a detachment with n people in it, add a pithela friend too.

“Now you can start with a detachment of adventurers, take 6 people, manage one of them, and the rest will follow you. But you can switch from one to another on the fly, if they were with you from the very beginning. You can still get other satellites to the team, but also have a group, inside which it is possible to switch between the characters.

Image of the adventurer mode from Redditor Shimmybot

“If you want to fight, you can manage only one [and leave worries about managing the remaining AI]. But if you wish, you can switch to the old system as in SSI games: perform one action, monitor each small aspect. This is a little slower, but you will feel complete control over your group, you will not have to make the wrong choice until you make it purposefully. This method is more pleasant. So this is one of the things before we finish the system of magic that people will be bored with and receive a bunch of various stories.”

The main thing that the villainous update will be focused on is a significant branch of events in both the fortress mode and in the adventurer mode. In fact, Dwarf Fortress will receive more smart “bad guys”, and the code for villains will allow you and your companions to interact with the world at a much deeper level in the adventurer mode.

“They are not all the villains in the traditional sense of evil, but they create stories for stories. They come with schemes, in ways to crush your fortress, for example, to steal all the artifacts, recruiting one of your yardans so that he tried to remove the leader of your fortress. You have tools for determining such things, and you can prevent such situations before everything goes wrong. This also allows the villains to give orders to the characters to move on the map, arrive in your fort or other area for some purpose.

“All orders are essentially just‘ go there, do it ’, and they do not differ from the existing opportunity in the adventurer mode to tell the satellites to build a wooden shelter or something else. You can tell them to kidnap someone, create a plan for the assignment of someone else, try to make a whole corruption network inside the city, so that at some point to shift the baron or something else. For example, you have a group of people, you send 5 of them with orders, they will then return with a report on the work done, and all the code that is behind the work of the villains is very slightly different from what has already been done.”

“Suddenly, you get the opportunity to do really interesting things, almost in the style of the mafia, in the adventurer mode. The heroic side is the study of the villainous plans, climbing the chain, so that then one simple action … At first it may seem that you are fed from a spoon, because it is difficult to program such investigations. Search for evidence and the relationship between things is quite difficult. But I am sure that it is necessary to provide at least some satisfactory experience of the investigation, both in the mode of the fort and in the adventurer mode.”

To better understand what the villains will do, here are some notes from the Dwarf Fortress blog in the past few months:

I worked on the completion of several plots for villains, smoothing the corners and introducing the use of the dungeons and what I previously said. This includes the opportunity to put in prison with a bribery, false evidence, kidnapping, sabotage and trying to rekindle the war between your enemies.
Added for corruption networks tracking the accumulated, a little smoothed out here and there, made sure that mercenaries created from religious groups (opposing the main beliefs) work correctly.
Previously, prisoners were just prisoners all the time that they were in imprisonment (before escaping, conquest, etc.D.). Now a swindler can spend five years in a dungeon without trying to escape, then go outside and do something else that is important while we add ways to solve the problem with villains without the help of murders. Those should be able to create false accusations or somehow put in jail.

Another ordinary day in the fortress.

DASTACTIC Yutuber Image

Computers on vampires: they exist.

Let me explain to me. As much time as there are games with a deep simulation system, people create the most unimaginable things in them. How exactly it works often even more interesting than what is it in itself. The text editor sounds boring. A text editor made in Minecraft using thousands of redstone units? Pretty radical.

DWARF FORTRESS players are terribly inventive – the DF Vicki has a calculation page that describes how to use intra -game pressure slabs, open and closed doors, animals and other objects to recreate a binary code.

Tarn Adams, developer Dwarf Fortress, told me that vampires are very effective computer operators. When I asked what the strangest achievement in Steam can be added, this was not what I expected to hear (on the other hand, you can’t know what to expect from Dwarf Fortress).

“Oh, Lord. What the strangest thing can happen?“Adams asked with a laugh. “People made these computers on vampires. We can push them – for example, the vampire steps on the pressure stove, so we lead them to the development of computers.”

I need to know more, no doubt. Adams explains.

“Immortal vampires at computers. They do not need to sleep or eat, so they can work forever if you add them to a military detachment and put points for patrols. You can count on them much more than animals if we are talking about computers managing.”
I could not find a video certificate with a vampir -controlled computer, but I think Adams saw many wildest inventions over these 13 years, how many Dwarf Fortress is available. There is, at least, a page in Wiki with a description of the use of immortal vampires to switch levers (in addition, excellent librarians come out of them until you let them go crazy due to their clothes that have been rotten).

If you can build a mechanism on vampires in Dwarf Fortress, please share with us. The world should see this. In the meantime, here is a video with the game Space Invaders built inside Dwarf Fortress.